Global Development:
Science and Policies for the Future

	Anne Goujon World Population Program, IIASA "Human Capital is the Key to Global Development"
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Synopsis:

We live in a demographically divided world, where some populations are expanding rapidly, while others are shrinking and ageing at a fast pace. The research undertaken at IIASA by the World Population Program (POP) is aimed at enhancing our knowledge and understanding of such trends and their implications for society and future policy. IIASA’s probabilistic world population projections show that with a  probability of 85-90 percent, world population as a whole will reach a peak and start to decline over the course of the 21st century. This has given rise to the notion of the “end of world population growth”. It will be associated with massive population ageing.

We have added the dimension of educational attainment to the consideration of population by age and sex to cover the “quality dimension”. Levels of educational attainment can be readily measured for most countries and are of crucial importance for many aspects of development as will be discussed in the presentation. We define human capital as the number of people, their age structure and their education. Using demographic multi-state methods for back-projection along cohort lines, we produced the first fully consistent, historical dataset by five-year age groups, sex and four educational attainment categories for 120 countries for 1970-2005. Using the same methodology, we also produced education projections for all countries to 2050.

While it has been established without any doubt that at the micro level, education is good for an individual’s health and income, econometric analysis has not shown the same findings for income at the macro level due to inappropriate education data. Based on our new dataset we now get consistently significant, positive returns to education. Moreover, we find that secondary education has a key role in addition to broad-based primary education.

Presenter: Anne Goujon
Authors: Jesus Crespo Cuaresma, Anne Goujon, Samir K.C. and Wolfgang Lutz

Short biography:

Anne Goujon is a demographer. She first joined the IIASA Population Program in January 1994 and is currently a Research Scholar.

Dr. Goujon received her PhD in social and economic science from the University of Vienna in 2003 and her master's degree in development economics from the University “La Sorbonne” in Paris in 1990. From 1991 to 1994, she occupied several positions within the development community (UNESCO-Paris, UNICEF-New York, ECDPM-Maastricht, NGO ‘EquiLibre’-Iraq). Since 2002 she has also been a researcher at the Vienna Institute of Demography (Austrian Academy of Sciences). She is working mainly in the development of population and education projections. She has applied the methodology of multi-educational state population projections to several settings (North Africa, Middle East countries, the Yucatan Peninsula, thirteen World regions, Indian States).

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Last updated: 18 Dec 2007